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2 New Ways to Discover Candidates Who Are Open to Hearing From You on LinkedIn

October 6, 2016

We recently surveyed tens of thousands of LinkedIn members about how they look for a job and were surprised to find that 90% of professionals were open to new opportunities if they were presented with the right role. Most of those professionals weren’t actively looking, but they were leaving the door open just enough to learn more.

This is very exciting, but also daunting: How do you find the candidates who are open to YOUR opportunity? LinkedIn Recruiter helps you search for candidates who are a good fit for your role, but you can’t search for those who are interested. LinkedIn Jobs are the best way to get quality applicants for professional roles, but you only see the candidates who finish the application. We’re about to change that.

Today we are thrilled to introduce two new features that will help you reach that group of open talent: Open Candidates and Apply Starters.

Open Candidates allows members to privately share with recruiters that they’re open to new opportunities, and indicate what types of roles they’re most interested in. Apply Starters surfaces all candidates that start applying to your jobs, even if they don’t finish, because we know that most of them don’t complete the full application on your career site.

We’ve been collecting this information from members for a couple months; there are now more than a million open candidates on LinkedIn and at least twice as many candidates for your jobs because of Apply Starters. These candidates are more than twice as likely to respond when you reach out.

Open Candidates: Quickly discover open candidates to reduce your time to hire

The first step to surfacing open candidates was to allow members to tell us that they were open to new opportunities. For Recruiter customers, this means that for the first time ever, you can find candidates who have explicitly raised their hand to say, “I’m open to new opportunities” but are not applying to your jobs and may not know about your company. These open candidates are twice as likely to respond to your outreach.

Here’s how it works:

Members can now let recruiters know that they’re open to new opportunities from the “Preferences” tab on the Jobs home page. To protect member privacy we’re only surfacing that within LinkedIn Recruiter, and we won’t share that information with anybody at their current employer.

You can find these open candidates by clicking the spotlight called “open to new opportunities” in Recruiter search, as shown in the screenshot above

When you hover over an open candidate’s profile summary, a dropdown appears with details on roles they’re interested in, their willingness to work remotely or relocate, their available start date, and more. You could previously only get this through an interview - now you have it upfront so you can qualify candidates that much faster.

If you want to be notified when other candidates say they’re open to new opportunities, save them to your projects folder in Recruiter so you’ll be the first to know.

We’ve been piloting this feature for a couple months and there are now almost one million members across the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom who have signaled that they are open to new opportunities on LinkedIn. We will continue to expand this service to additional markets through 2016.

"I was following a candidate, and the minute she shared her career interests I was notified and reached out. She was kind of surprised by how fast I reached out! I would never be able to create this pool of talent on my own," says Angela Bertolini, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at MIND Research Institute.

Apply Starters: Capture more applicants, even if they don’t complete the process

Open Candidates will help you reach candidates who’ve told us that they’re open to new opportunities, but there’s another talent pool that’s been sitting just beyond your reach. There are plenty of candidates who start applying to jobs, but many don’t finish - one estimate suggests that as many as 74% drop off after they arrive at your career site. Maybe they were applying on their phone, maybe there were too many questions, or maybe they were just too busy.

These apply starters are interested in your company, and in your role - but you haven’t been able to reach them until now. We’re now giving them the option to share their profile when they start applying to your job, which will double or potentially triple the number of candidates in your applicant pool. You can only get access to these candidates on LinkedIn, because it’s the only site on the web that knows who the candidates are before they even start applying.

Here’s how it works:

Members choose to share their profile with you when they click “Apply on Company Website” before being redirected to your career site (Apply Starters does not apply to jobs where you collect applicants on LinkedIn, because the application is so short that there’s minimal drop off)

You’ll see a tab to view the candidates when you click on any job you’ve posted within “Manage Jobs” in Recruiter

You’ll receive a weekly email digest that surfaces new candidates who have started applying

Later in 2016, we’ll surface them to you in LinkedIn Recruiter spotlights so you can focus on these candidates who are more likely to respond

As it turns out, apply starters are just as interested as the people who completed the application and are 4 times as likely to respond to recruiter outreach as the average candidate. But don’t worry: there’s no obligation for you to follow-up if you aren’t interested or don’t have a need; you can opportunistically reach out to the candidates who look like they’d be a good fit.

Apply Starters has launched in the US and Canada and will expand to all our other markets by the end of 2016.

Almost every LinkedIn member is open to hearing about new opportunities and we’re excited that these two new signals will help you tap into that talent pool in a more intelligent - and more efficient - way. But we know that there are millions of signals of intent that can help make your outreach more targeted, and we’re committed to uncovering those for you over time. This is just the beginning.